A Bantam Hardcover (Tres Navarre series #4)
Pub Date: June 2001
ISBN: 0-553-11097-7
The Story
Tres Navarre, private eye and
sometimes English professor, is hoping for a laid back working vacation when he
accepts a summer teaching gig at the University of Texas at Austin, even if it
means shacking up for six weeks with his big brother Garrett, who calls Austin
home.
Garrett Navarre -- computer
programmer extraordinaire, Jimmy Buffett fanatic, and all-around eccentric -- is
hoping to retire a multi-millionaire by the end of summer, thanks to a high tech
start-up company he and two buddies have launched. Garrett has bet everything
from his career to the Navarre family ranch that the company will stay alive
long enough to make a public stock offering, allowing him to ride the Austin
high tech boom right into the saddle of luxury.
Tres and Garrett’s hopes are
both shattered with a single gunshot. Garrett’s oldest friend and business
partner turns up murdered at his lakefront home, and Garrett is the only
suspect.
As Tres delves into Garrett’s
bizarre world to find the truth behind the murder, he comes face to face with
the damaged relationships, violent lives, and billion-dollar schemes of a brave
new high tech world.
Among the players: Matthew Peña,
a corporate take-over artist with a trail of broken enemies in his wake and an
overzealous desire to make Garrett’s company his own; Ruby McBride, the
victim’s wife, a hard-edged beauty haunted by three generations of family
failure; and W.B. Doebler, the head of an oil-rich clan with more power than
morals, and enough skeletons in the closet to man a ghost ship.
Connecting them all – the beautiful waters of Lake Travis, and an
unspeakable evil that lies beneath their depths.
The Reviews
"Powerful writing about palpable evil. A book sure to enhance the author's solid reputation."
-- Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Navarre just may have become the most appealing mystery hero in Texas. His latest is pure heaven for mystery fans."
-- Booklist, starred review
"Like the rivers in Texas, Rick Riordan's novels meander all over the map, overrunning their banks and flooding backyards, flushing out interesting life forms wherever they go. Whether he's helping to bust up a wedding at Scholz Bier Garten of attending the raucous funeral of a Jimmy Buffett 'Parrot Head,' Tres [Navarre] has a knack for showing readers a crazy good time."
-- New York Times Book Review
"A full cast of fascinating whodunit characters, a solid job of storytelling, and Riordan renders two underwater set pieces and the final confrontation with the killer as spookily and breathlessly as any suspense fan could wish."
-- Los Angeles Times Book Review
"First-class. Riordan is one of those writers who can casually enrich the mystery field without any sense of slumming. Ross MacDonald must be beaming down from somewhere."
-- The Chicago Tribune
"Sarcastic humor, memorable characters, and spectacular action scenes round out a spellbinding adventure. Highly recommended."
-- Library Journal
"Riordan's grasp of the great state of Texas is legendary, and he displays quite an aptitude for characterizations as well, particularly his urbanely lethal villains. If you like the writing of Dennis Lehane or Randy Wayne White, you'll enjoy getting acquainted with Rick Riordan."
-- BookPage
"A dang fine Texas writer and fun to read. There is a special charm to Texans, and Riordan brings it to this book with fine writing throughout."
-- San Jose Mercury News
" A fast-paced tale, expertly told. The superb plot twist is a thing of rare beauty. When the truth is finally and cataclysmically revealed, all the pieces fall into place but not necessarily into the places one expected. The sum of these parts is a great summer read."
-- The Denver Post
"Peopled with characters as diverse as country-club trust-funders, oil-rich newcomers and well-armed bikers, Mr. Riordan's novel is a colorful look at what goes on in Austin every day, and the fun of living in the capital of a state such as Texas."
-- The Dallas Morning News
"Witty, sharp as glass, and plotted as well as it's written, The Devil Went Down to Austin paints a high-tech Texas laced with treachery and tequila before a cranked-up Jimmy Buffett backdrop. Expect great things, because Riordan delivers."
--Michael Hudson, Amazon.com
"Another terrific tale by San Antonio's Rick Riordan. The novel has . . . just about everything you could want from an action adventure."
-- The Houston Chronicle
"The best book of his admittedly young career. Riordan outdoes himself and
carves another notch on his belt -- The Devil Went Down to Austin is a
heady nightcap of sass and suspense with a twist of mayhem."
-- The Austin Chronicle
"Liberally mixed into this blend of angst, emotion, [and] violence, humor is the leavening agent that keeps this book skimming along as smoothly as a day sailing on Lake Travis. I can think of few better ways to spend a long, hot summer's day in Texas than reading a good Tres Navarre mystery."
-- The San Antonio Express-News
The Virtual Tour
Lake Travis Guide. Get the latest news on Lake Travis, where the majority of DEVIL takes place.
Dive Texas On-Line Magazine. Information on the scuba diving scene in Texas -- from the Gulf of Mexico to the best freshwater dive spots. If you want the underwater tour of the scenes from DEVIL, this is a good place to start.
Austin History. An FAQ on little facts about the City of the Violet Crown.
University of Texas at Austin. Tres' summer teaching gig takes place at UT Austin, which also happens to be my alma mater.
The Driskill Hotel. The coolest place to stay in Austin. Maia and Matthew Pena both get rooms here.
Emerald Point Marina. A great place to visit on Lake Travis, with a boat dock operation similar to Ruby McBride's.
Scholz Garten. Austin's oldest watering hole, and the scene of a slight altercation between Clyde Simms and the rest of the world in DEVIL.
Travis County Sheriff's Department. Check out the work offices of Detective Vic Lopez.
LCRA - Lake Travis - Mansfield Dam. Mansfield Dam looms large, both on Lake Travis and in the novel. Check out the story of how it was built.
Windy Point -- The Travis County Parks homepage will tell you about Windy Point, a favorite dive location. Tres first meets Matthew Pena here.
Texas Department of Public Safety -- Check out the DPS crime lab. Tres observes some important ballistics tests here.
Tom's Dive & Ski. These good folks gave yours truly a tour of some of the underwater sites that would appear in DEVIL. This is also where I got my open-water scuba certification. Stop by and say hello.
Background Articles:
The Devil Went Down to Austin
-Or-
How I Found Myself Sixty Feet Under
By Rick Riordan
I couldn’t shake the image of the body.
That’s the problem with researching for a novel. You never quite know where your explorations will take you. This time, one chance conversation with a Travis County Deputy had left me haunted by an image of underwater death.
And now I was wearing a wet suit and thirty pounds of scuba gear on a hot September afternoon, ready to submerge myself in Lake Travis.
“Watch your fingers,” my instructor Dave told me, rattling his package of Ball Park Franks. “The catfish are like vacuum cleaners. You offer them one of these, they’ll take your fingers with it in about a second.”
I thanked him for the warning, wondering for the hundredth time what I was doing here. I was no great thrill-seeker. I wasn’t even a good swimmer.
My novel was about the Austin high tech industry. Lord knows, I’d already gotten enough good material to fuel a dozen murder mysteries. But something told me the real center of the story would be here -- at the lake. Or rather, below it.
The
water was beautiful that morning, green and glittering. Speedboats cut across
the channel and the air shimmered with heat. Even with a wet suit, the first
plunge was shockingly cold.
Dave and I kicked away from the stairs, tugged on our fins, then swam toward the buoy that marked our training area.
“You didn’t make the platform last time,” Dave remembered. “Why don’t you try again?”
The challenge sounded simple enough – hold your breath, dive to the platform twenty feet below, touch the rail, and come back up. Last time, I’d panicked halfway down.
“Sure,” I said.
Then, before I could chicken out, I took a breath and dived.
I kicked toward the bottom, saw a flash of silver, touched the railing, then turned and made my way back up. My lungs were burning. I broke the top, gasping for air but feeling rather proud of myself.
Dave studied me calmly. “That really winded you, didn’t it?”
Dave was fifteen years my senior. He gave me to understand he could dive to the platform and swim around it a couple of times before feeling the need to surface.
I gritted my teeth. I knew the worst was yet to come.
We would do our deepest dive today – down to sixty feet. This was the part of the scuba course that had prompted my wife to ask if my life insurance policy was up to date.
As it turned out, the dive wasn’t as hard as I’d thought. I learned to gain neutral buoyancy, to maneuver with my fins rather than my hands. We fed the enormous catfish, who seemed to expect the hot dogs as tribute for invading their territory. Then Dave gave me a silent tour of the boulder-strewn landscape under the lake -- the strange sculptures, the sunken boats, the shifting green and black horizon. The water was like an icebox at sixty feet, but always there was a deeper darkness off to one side -- a silty slope descending into the ancient river bed. I could understand the desire to go deeper – to explore what was down there. But all too soon, Dave was tapping his watch, telling me it was time to ascend.
We sat on a boulder at twenty feet, playing tic tac toe while we waited for the nitrogen to vent from our systems. I kept thinking of the body the Travis County Deputy had told me about, discovered in water twice as deep as what I’d ventured today, when the drought had brought water levels low enough to open the deepest sections of the lake to diving – sections that had been out of reach for decades.
Dave had been to the place. He’d described it for me, confirmed that it was treacherous, spooky even to a veteran diver.
When I came up out of the lake that morning, my scuba certification complete, I knew that my diving lessons had only started. I had a much deeper, more dangerous dive to write about. I had to figure out who that body was, so deep underwater, and why the murderer had chosen to place it there.
I found out.
In writing the novel, I delved deeper than I’d ever gone before, and explored some pretty dark places. In my previous novels, I’d often been in the mind of my protagonist, but until DEVIL, I can honestly say that I’d never fully understood what it was like to be in the mind of the killer.
THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO AUSTIN is still about Austin high tech -- the crazy boomtown mentality that turns programmers into millionaires, or homicidal maniacs, or both. It’s about sibling rivalry between my protagonist Tres Navarre and his brother Garrett. And it’s an homage to my college town and how radically it’s changed. But more than anything, the novel is about the allure of deep places.
People can be a lot more voracious than catfish.
And there are things in Lake Travis creepier than the chill at sixty feet.
“The Prized Gentleman” to appear in EQMM
And
now for something completely different. In a forthcoming issue of Ellery
Queen’s Mystery Magazine, look for a Rick Riordan short story set in
Williamsburg, Virginia in 1773.
The story grew out my summer trip to the Teacher’s Institute at Colonial Williamsburg, where — as an eighth grade American history teacher — I joined thirty other colleagues for on-site research into Colonial life. As part of the Institute, we each spent a week studying the life of one Williamsburg citizen, and mine happened to be Clementina Rind.
Clementina Rind was one of the few female newspaper editors in Colonial America. She was the only woman to receive a commission as public printer, and was the first person to print Thomas Jefferson’s ideas on the rights of British colonists. She and her husband William were persuaded to move to Williamsburg from Maryland to start the Virginia Gazette, which their patrons hoped would provide an alternative forum to the conservative, pro-government newspaper then in operation. In 1773, William Rind died, leaving Clementina with a business to run, ample debts, and five children to raise. Clementina was re-issued his commission as public printer, and continued publishing the Gazette without missing a single issue.
I grew rather fond of Clementina, and decided she would make an interesting protagonist. Hence, her first outing in “The Prized Gentleman.” The story marks several “firsts” for me. It’s my first attempt at historical fiction. (The staff at Colonial Williamsburg was good enough to read the manuscript and help me with that part.) It was my first story from a woman’s point of view, my first “cozy,” and my first opportunity to apply my day job teaching American history to my fiction. The story is written in first person, in 18th Century style, and was quite a felicitous experience. It’s about as far from the mean streets of Tres Navarre’s San Antonio as I can imagine, but I hope you’ll check it out!
A taste of South Texas — Garrett Navarre’s Macho Fajitas
Ready
for a spring cookout? Try Garrett’s own recipe for marinated fajitas, which he
makes at a lakeside barbecue early in THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO AUSTIN.
Enjoy!
Macho Fajita Mix:
1 cup tequila
1 Shiner Bock beer (Dos Equis will do, if you can’t get Shiner)
¼ cup jalapenos + juice
1 tablespoon black pepper
¼ cup soy sauce
¼ cup lime juice
1. Trim flank steak, tenderize with hammer, and let soak in mixture for at least two hours in the fridge. While waiting, put on some vintage Jimmy Buffett, such as Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude.
2. Drink a beer.
3. Barbecue over a mesquite wood fire until done.
4. Drink another beer.
5. Cut fajita meat into thin strips, slicing against the grain. Serve with fresh tortillas, guacamole, cheese, sour cream, and pico de gallo.
6. Eat fajitas and drink more beer.
Back